Barthes Mythology
' ' Barthes Mythology ' ' Barthes essay, Myth, is a continuation of the theory of Saussure's theories on semiotics. In his essay, Saussure talks about the sign, signified, and signifier in the human language. Barthes takes that a step further, and gives those ideas a more abstract cultural context. Barthes talks about how each word or symbol or what have you has a deeper meaning and means different things to different people based on that person's personal experiences. Barthes ideas had a large impact on the way people and things were represented in the 1970’s, especially in and essay he wrote about the language used in certain magazines about the conflict going on in Algeria at the time, and even today we can see Barthes Mythology used in out day to day lives. In the 1970’s Barthes wrote an essay called “Grammaire africaine”. This essay, which revolved around his Mythology ideas, talked about how certain right-wing magazines or newspaper articles used certain language to portray and analyze the conflict in Algeria, which at the time was revolving around Algeria’s decolonization from France after the Second World War. Barthes noticed all the things he was reading about this conflict were worded and structures in way that pushed Frances political agenda into foreign affairs. For example the articles Barthes read described the Algerians as “hors-la-loi” which means outlaw in English, and the articles used this to show that whatever demands the Algerians had were considered illegitimate because they were outlaws. The French press calling Algerians outlaws, is an example of Barthes Myth in that it gives a right-wing skewed cultural context to the French people that read it, in that when people read these articles, they would start associated the word “Outlaw” and the basic thoughts that revolve around that word to the people of Algeria. As for today, in class we talked about advertising, which is riddled with Barthes Mythology. From the stock images of woman laughing into salads, which is meant to show that eating a salad will make you happy, to any Axe commercial, which is meant to show that if you use our product meant for high school boys who think they are cool you will be a stud and get all the ladies. Commercials, in my opinion, are probably the thing that we can apply Myth to the most. Every commercial uses some sort of symbol or has some sort of slogan that is meant to be easy to memorize and force you to think about whatever product is being advertise in your day to day life. In conclusion, Most things, if not everything, has some sort of cultural representation that could be considered apart of Barthes Myth, and that idea hard a large impact on a variety of things. Things like how newspapers and magazine articles represented Algerians after World War II, to the way things ,like Axe products, are advertised in today's times, and a lot more things that were not mentioned in this essay. Category:Barthes Category:Mythology Category:Sign, Signified, and Signifier